Vol. 8, No.

1 (2014)

http://www.eludamos.org

Introduction: Ludic Seriality, Digital Seriality

Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann
Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2014; 8 (1), pp. 1-5
Introduction: Ludic Seriality, Digital Seriality
SHANE DENSON AND ANDREAS JAHN-SUDMANN

Seriality and the digital are key concepts for an understanding of many current forms,
texts, and technologies of media, and they are implicated in much broader media-
historical trajectories as well. Beyond the forms and functions of specific cultural
artifacts, they are increasingly central to our contemporary global media ecology.
Surprisingly, though, relatively few attempts have been made at thinking the digital
and the serial together, as intimately connected perspectives on media.

This is precisely the task of the present issue of Eludamos. On the one hand, the
papers collected here interrogate the serial conditions, forms, and effects of digital
culture; on the other hand, they question the role of the digital as technocultural
embodiment, determinant, or matrix for serialized media aesthetics and practices.
The special issue thus brings together heretofore isolated perspectives and
orientations, deriving from studies of new media culture on the one hand (cf.
Manovich 2001, Jenkins 2006) and from the emerging scholarship on seriality on the
other (cf. Kelleter 2012, Allen and van den Berg 2014). Through this encounter, we
hope to shed light on some of the key developments germane to a cultural, media-
theoretical, and media-historical (or media-archaeological) assessment of
serialization and digitalization as processes central to our increasingly ludic media
environments.

According to German media theorist Jens Schröter, the analog/digital divide is the
“key media-historical and media-theoretical distinction of the second half of the
twentieth century” (Schröter 2004, 9, our translation). And while this assessment is
widely accepted as a relatively uncontroversial account of the most significant media
transformation in recent history, the task of evaluating the distinction’s inherent
epistemological problems is all the more fraught with difficulty (see Hagen 2002, Pias
2003, Schröter 2004). Be that as it may, since the 1990s at the latest, virtually any
attempt to address the cultural and material specificity of contemporary media culture
has inevitably entailed some sort of (implicit or explicit) evaluation of this key
distinction’s historical significance, thus giving rise to characterizations of the
analog/digital divide as caesura, upheaval, or even revolution (Glaubitz et al. 2011).
Seen through the lens of such theoretical histories, the technical and especially
visual media that shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (photography, film,
television) typically appear today as the objects of contemporary digitization
processes, i.e. as visible manifestations (or remnants) of a historical transition from
an analog (or industrial) to a digital era (Freyermuth and Gotto 2013). Conversely,
despite its analog pre-history today’s digital computer has primarily been addressed
as the medium of such digitization processes – or, in another famous account, as the
end point of media history itself (Kittler 1986).

The case of digital games (as a software medium) is similar to that of the computer
as a hardware medium: although the differences and similarities between digital
games and older media were widely discussed in the context of the so-called

Eludamos Vol. 8, No. 1 (2014)

pp. 1-5
Copyright © by Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann
2 Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture • Vol. 8, No. 1 (2014)

narratology-versus-ludology debate (Eskelinen 2001; Juul 2001; Murray 1997, 2004;

Ryan 2006), only marginal attention was paid in these debates to the media-historical
significance of the analog/digital distinction itself. Moreover, many game scholars
have tended to ontologize the computer game to a certain extent and to treat it as a
central form or expression of digital culture, rather than tracing its complex historical
emergence and its role in brokering the transition from analog to digital (significant
exceptions like Pias 2002 notwithstanding). Other media-historiographical
approaches, like Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation (1999), allow us to
situate the digital game within a more capacious history of popular-technical media,
but such accounts relate primarily to the representational rather than the operative
level of the game, so that the digital game’s “ergodic” form (Aarseth 1999) remains
largely unconsidered.

Against this background, we would like to suggest an alternative angle from which to
situate and theorize the digital game as part of a larger media history (and a broader
media ecology), an approach that attends to both the representational level of visible
surfaces/interfaces and the operative level of code and algorithmic form: Our
suggestion is to look at forms and processes of seriality/serialization as they manifest
themselves in digital games and gaming cultures, and to focus on these phenomena
as a means to understand both the continuities and the discontinuities that mark the
transition from analog to digital media forms and our ludic engagements with them.
Ultimately, we propose, the computer game simultaneously occupies a place in a
long history of popular seriality (which stretches from pre-digital serial literature, film,
radio, and television, to contemporary transmedia franchises) while it also
instantiates novel forms of a specifically digital type of seriality (cf. Denson and Jahn-
Sudmann 2013). By grappling with the formal commensurabilities and differences
that characterize digital games’ relations to pre-digital (and non-ludic) forms of medial
seriality, we therefore hope to contribute to a more nuanced account of the historical
process (rather than event) of the analog/digital divide’s emergence.

Overall, as we argued in the last issue of Eludamos, seriality is a central and

multifaceted but largely neglected dimension of popular computer and video games.
Seriality is a factor not only in explicitly marked game series (with their sequels,
prequels, remakes, and other types of continuation), but also within games
themselves (e.g. in their formal-structural constitution as an iterative series of levels,
worlds, or missions). Serial forms of variation and repetition also appear in the
transmedial relations between games and other media (e.g. expansive serializations
of narrative worlds across the media of comics, film, television, and games, etc.).
Additionally, we can grasp the relevance of games as a paradigm example of digital
seriality when we think of the ways in which the technical conditions of the digital
challenge the temporal procedures and developmental logics of the analog era, e.g.
because once successively appearing series installments are increasingly available
for immediate, repeated, and non-linear forms of consumption. And while this media
logic of the database (cf. Manovich 2001, p. 218) can be seen to transform all serial
media forms in our current age of digitization and media convergence, a careful study
of the interplay between real-time interaction and serialization in digital games
promises to shed light on the larger media-aesthetic questions of the transition to a
digital media environment. Finally, digital games are not only symptoms and
expressions of this transition, but also agents in the larger networks through which it
has been navigated and negotiated; serial forms, which inherently track the
 Denson and Jahn-Sudmann • Introduction 3

processes of temporal and historical change as they unfold over time, have been
central to this media-cultural undertaking (for similar perspectives on seriality in a
variety of media, cf. Denson and Mayer 2012, Fahle 2012, Jahn-Sudmann and
Kelleter 2012, Mayer 2013, Beil et al. 2013, Kelleter 2014).

To better understand the cultural forms and affective dimensions of what we have
called digital games’ serial interfacings and the collective serializations of digital
gaming cultures (cf. Denson and Jahn-Sudmann 2013), and in order to make sense
of the historical and formal relations of seriality to the emergence and negotiation of
the analog/digital divide, the articles collected in this special issue of Eludamos:
Journal of Computer Game Culture explore heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting
aspects of game-related seriality from a wide variety of perspectives, including
media-philosophical, media-archeological, and cultural-theoretical approaches. They
address the relations between seriality, temporality, and digitality in their formal and
affective dimensions, and they conceive digital (and sometimes proto-digital)
serialities in terms not only of their narrative manifestations but also their technical-
operational impacts on our media environments. In this way, they offer a rich and
nuanced picture not only of contemporary computer-game cultures but also of the
larger ecologies and histories of ludic media practices.

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